The higher truths of philosophy and religion are very far removed from
sense. Admitting that, like all other knowledge, they are derived from
experience, and that experience is ultimately resolvable into facts which
come to us through the eye and ear, still their origin is a mere accident
which has nothing to do with their true nature. They are universal and
unseen; they belong to all times--past, present, and future. Any worthy
notion of mind or reason includes them. The proof of them is, 1st, their
comprehensiveness and consistency with one another; 2ndly, their agreement
with history and experience. But sensation is of the present only, is
isolated, is and is not in successive moments. It takes the passing hour
as it comes, following the lead of the eye or ear instead of the command of
reason. It is a faculty which man has in common with the animals, and in
which he is inferior to many of them. The importance of the senses in us
is that they are the apertures of the mind, doors and windows through which
we take in and make our own the materials of knowledge. Regarded in any
other point of view sensation is of all mental acts the most trivial and
superficial. Hence the term 'sensational' is rightly used to express what
is shallow in thought and feeling.

We propose in what follows, first of all, like Plato in the Theaetetus, to
analyse sensation, and secondly to trace the connexion between theories of
sensation and a sensational or Epicurean philosophy.

Paragraph I. We, as well as the ancients, speak of the five senses, and of
a sense, or common sense, which is the abstraction of them. The term
'sense' is also used metaphorically, both in ancient and modern philosophy,
to express the operations of the mind which are immediate or intuitive. Of
the five senses, two--the sight and the hearing--are of a more subtle and
complex nature, while two others--the smell and the taste--seem to be only